Hyper Cities with Winy Maas

This episode of the Super Urban Podcast ventures into one of the most expansive propositions in contemporary architectural thinking: that everything is urbanism. Drawing from Winy Maas's 2019 guest editorship of Domus, the conversation explores what it means when the city is no longer a bounded object but a total condition — absorbing climate systems, data networks, food production, finance, and human behaviour into a single, planetary field of design. The discussion moves through the long arc of MVRDV's data-driven and speculative work — from Metacity/Datatown and Pig City to FARMAX and KM3 — tracing how architecture shifted from describing objects to modelling systems, using data not as neutral optimisation but as a critical tool to expose contradictions and test urban limits.

The conversation also tackles the concept of Biotopia — a future where buildings operate as living ecosystems — alongside the transformation of infrastructure into culture, as seen in projects like Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen. Threading through each of these themes is a consistent tension: does the expansion of architecture's scope into ecology, biology, economics, and atmosphere empower the discipline or risk dissolving its capacity to act and resist? The episode closes with a preview of Sky City, a project developed through The Why Factory currently being co-taught as a studio at RMIT University in Melbourne, which asks what urbanism becomes when the sky itself is treated as a designed, contested, and algorithmically governed urban layer.

Winy Maas is a Dutch architect, urbanist, and co-founding partner of Rotterdam-based MVRDV, established in 1993 alongside Jacob van Rijs and Nathalie de Vries. His leadership has driven many of the office's award-winning projects, including Rotterdam's Markthal, the Tianjin Binhai Library, and Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen — the first publicly accessible art depot in the world. He is also the founder of The Why Factory, a research laboratory dedicated to speculative urban futures, and holds professorships at both MIT and TU Delft.

SUP is hosted by Ian Nazareth, Graham Crist and Christine Phillips.  

This podcast is produced with support from the Alastair Swayn Foundation and the RMIT University School of Architecture & Urban Design.

We acknowledge the people of the Woi wurrung and Boon wurrung language groups on whose unceded Country we are recording this podcast.